Have you ever found yourself saying, “Is this it?” Is this all I’ve ever wanted to do?” Have you ever felt a distinct feeling that there must be more to life than the daily grind you’ve found yourself in? A pull towards a bigger, more expansive life, although maybe you aren’t quite sure exactly what that looks like.
Because I have totally been there.
The last few years of my medical career, I kept feeling this tug towards something greater. A voice inside of me kept saying “This is not your work. This is not your path anymore.”
But the thought of actually walking away from this career that I’d built, of actually quitting medicine, seemed like such an absurd, impractical thing to do.
I had a huge list of reasons why I shouldn’t quit medicine. They all seemed like fairly logical reasons too:
I had invested most of my 20’s trying to become a doctor.
I was up to my ears in student loans.
I didn’t have another set career path lined up.
Anyone I talked to would verify the soundness of my reasons and raise their eyebrows at any talk of quitting medicine.
But the thing is, whenever we are following our heart more than our head, there are risks involved. And whenever we are about to do something risky like quit our jobs, or travel the world, our mind can always come up with a million reasons why we shouldn’t do that thing.
Looking back now, I see that many of these reasons I had for not doing the thing on my heart were just excuses, pretexts put forward to cover up the REAL reason I wasn’t doing it: fear.
It’s so crazy because our fear can be so sneaky. It can masquerade as this super logical voice of reason as to why we shouldn’t do something. Fear can disguise itself as doing the “responsible thing” or the “practical thing”.
But until we dig beneath that and recognize fear for what it is, we can’t overcome it. We will spend the rest of our lives talking ourselves OUT of doing things that matter under the guise of being responsible.
Acknowledging and shining a light on our fear is the first step in the process of learning how to manage it. So I want to walk you through all the reasons I shouldn’t have quit residency and show you how all of those reasons were actually just fear talking.
Sunk costs
I spent 4 years in medical school and 1 year already in training for residency. I spent hours studying for standardized tests. I probably spent the equivalent of years of my life in the library. I already invested so much time and energy into becoming a doctor. Did I really want to let all of that go to waste? Wouldn’t it make more sense to “just finish” residency and try out what its like being an attending?
This is a classic example of the sunk costs fallacy.
A sunk cost is “a cost that an entity has incurred and which it can no longer recover”. Sunk costs should not be considered when making the decision to continue investing in an ongoing project since these costs cannot be recovered.
I think there are many false assumptions that can play into the sunk cost fallacy, but what they all come down to is fear.
I was scared that if I quit medicine I wouldn’t be able to succeed in my next career path to the degree necessary to make those sunk costs “worth it.” Afraid that I wouldn’t be successful enough in my next thing to prove to myself and to others that it was OK to quit medicine. Afraid that if I just quit medicine to pursue something else, that all that time and energy I invested would be wasted time.
But living life in fear of wasted time doesn’t make sense.
I had already spent the time and energy training to be a doctor. It was gone. There was absolutely nothing I could do to get that time back so continuing to dwell on that “wasted time” is totally irrelevant.
Continuing with medicine, although I knew it was no longer the path for me, was just setting myself up to waste EVEN MORE TIME.
I didn’t want to live like that. I wanted to cut my losses, accept that my desires evolved and changed and move in the direction that my intuition was calling me.
The money thing
Medical school is expensive and although I went to school in state and had a partial scholarship, I still racked up over $100,000 in student loans while studying to become a doctor.
On a side note, it still is absurd to me that as a 21 year old I was allowed to borrow this much money from the government, and essentially sign my soul over to paying it back.
For a long time, this was honestly one of the biggest things keeping me chained to medicine. My student loan balance felt like this massive weight on my shoulders. A hole I dug myself into with no way out except to continue on this career path. After all, I knew if I carried on with my medical training, in 3 years time I would be making that doctor salary. Meaning I could finally start to pay back my loans.
Thinking about quitting medicine and foregoing this guaranteed six figure, attending salary seemed insane and downright irresponsible.
But then I had a powerful breakthrough during a conversation with a life coach. She helped me see that money was the only thing standing in the way between me and my dream life.
Once I had that realization, it seemed completely unacceptable to me. How could I actually put a price tag on my soul? Was my well being, peace of mind and happiness actually worth $100,000 or was it priceless? I couldn’t stand for it. I couldn’t allow myself to be trapped in a miserable reality just because I was afraid of the unknown.
Because, in reality, this money excuse was just based in fear.
I was scared that I wouldn’t be able to make enough money in some alternate career path to pay back my loans. I was scared of being in debt forever.
I was afraid because I didn’t know exactly HOW I could make enough money to pay back this debt. But freaking out and worrying about how I was going to pay back my loans, I realized was living in fear and scarcity.
I decided that the only way out was to trust myself. Trust that if I was smart and resourceful enough to get my MD, I could figure out a path towards a different six figure salary. Trust that I would find a way to pay back my student loans, one dollar at a time.
I didn’t want to live in fear and scarcity. Instead I wanted to lean into possibility and opportunity. I decided to bet on myself and trust that it was possible to create abundant income while also pursuing a more aligned career path.
I had no guarantee that things would work out
It’s not like I had a set career lined up or an alternative job offer. I was going to start from scratch in a whole new career and on top of that build my entire own business. All things that I had absolutely zero experience in.
I didn’t have any actual examples of people who had done what I wanted to do. Quit a career in medicine halfway through residency, pivot to an entirely different career as a life coach and entrepreneur. Build that life coaching business up to multiple six figures and sustain that income long enough to pay back greater than $100,000 worth of loans. All while traveling the world.
I had no evidence that it was possible or that it had been done before, yet here I was with this desire on my heart and so I decided to go for it.
Maybe you have your own set of reasons as to why you shouldn’t go after your dreams. Maybe you are telling yourself its a waste of time, or you are worried about finances. Maybe you are trying to do the “practical thing” or “be responsible”.
Maybe your long list of reasons as to why you shouldn’t follow your heart seems logical and maybe your excuses make sense to your friends and family.
I want to challenge you to look deeper.
Write down all the reasons why you shouldn’t go after your dreams. And then ask yourself these two questions:
How are all these reasons actually just covering up fear? And what exactly am I scared of?
What could my life be like if I trusted myself instead?
I think the antidote to fear is trust. Trusting in yourself. Trusting in the universe. Trusting that when you are following your heart, things are going to work out.
Because there are always 1000 reasons why you SHOULDN’T do something, but most of the time those reasons are really just excuses covering up our fear. If we can learn to recognize that fear for what it is, we can begin to overcome it and start living a life greater than we’ve ever imagined.
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